At times the protective veil of paternal sentimentality slips, and Rabih sees that he has given over a very substantial share of the best days of his life to a pair of human beings who, if they weren’t his own children, would almost surely strike him as being fundamentally unremarkable—so much so, in fact, that were he to meet them in a pub in thirty years’ time, he might prefer not even to talk to them. The insight is unendurable.
Whatever modest denials parents may offer—however much they may downplay their ambitions in front of strangers—to have a child is, at the outset, at least, to make an assault on perfection, to attempt to create not just another average human being but an exemplar of distinctive perfection. Mediocrity, albeit the statistical norm, can never be the initial goal; the sacrifices required to get a child to adulthood are simply too great.
It’s a Saturday afternoon, and William is out playing football with a friend. Esther has stayed at home to put together the electronic circuit board she got for her birthday a few months back. She has enlisted Rabih’s help, and together they’re going through the instruction manual, wiring up bulbs and little motors and delighting in those moments when the whole system whirs into action. Rabih likes to tell his daughter that she would make a great electrical engineer. He can’t quite let go of his fantasy of her as an adult woman who will somehow manage to be at once entirely practical and yet also lyrically sensitive (a version of every woman he has loved). Esther adores the attention. She looks forward to the rare occasions when William is away and she has her dad all to herself. He calls her Besti; she sits on his lap and, when he hasn’t shaved for a day, complains about how strange and rough his skin feels. He brushes her hair back and covers her forehead with kisses. Kirsten watches them from across the room. Once, when Esther was four, she said to both her parents, with great seriousness, “I wish Mummy would die so I could marry Daddy.” Kirsten understands. She herself might have liked to have a kindly and reliable father to cuddle and build circuits with, and no one else around to bother them. She can see what a bewitching and glamorous figure Rabih could seem to someone under ten. He’s happy to get on the floor and play with Esther’s dolls; he takes her rock climbing, buys her dresses, goes cycling with her and talks to her about the brilliant engineers who built Scotland’s tunnels and bridges.
The relationship nevertheless makes Kirsten worry a little for her daughter’s future. She wonders how other men will be able to measure up to such standards of tenderness and focused attention—and whether Besti may end up rejecting a range of candidates based on nothing more than the fact that they don’t come close to offering her the sort of friendship she once enjoyed with her dad. Yet what niggles Kirsten most of all is the sentimentality of Rabih’s performance. She knows at first hand that the kindness he displays with their daughter is available from him only in his role as a father, not as a husband. She has plenty of experience with his drastic change in tone once the two of them are out of earshot of the children. He is unwittingly planting an image in Esther’s mind of how a man might ideally behave with a woman—notwithstanding that the ideal in no way reflects the truth of who he, Rabih, really is. Thus Esther may, in later life, ask a man who is acting in a selfish, distracted, and severe manner why he can’t be more like her father, little realizing that he is actually remarkably like Rabih—just not the only version of him that she ever got to see.
In the circumstances, it’s perhaps helpful that kindness has its limits and that these two parents, despite their best efforts, still manage (like all parents) regularly and deeply to annoy their children. Being outright cold, frightening, and cruel turns out to be only the first of many different means of ensuring alienation. Another quite effective strategy combines overprotectiveness, overinvolvement, and overcuddling, a trio of neurotic behaviors with which Rabih and Kirsten are deeply familiar. Rabih, the Beirut boy, frets about Esther and William every time they cross a road; he seeks a potentially vexing degree of closeness to them, asks them too often how their day was, always wants them to put on another layer of clothing, and imagines them as being more fragile than they really are—which is partly why Esther more than once snaps “Get off my case” at him, and not without cause.
Nor, indeed, can it be all that easy to have Kirsten as their mother, for this entails having to do a lot of extra spelling tests, being encouraged to play several musical instruments, and hearing continual reminders to eat healthful foods—a not entirely surprising set of priorities from someone who was the only student in her secondary-school class to go to university, and one of a minority not now living on benefits.
In certain moods Rabih can pity the children for having to deal with the two of them. He can understand their complaints about and resentment of the power that he and Kirsten wield over them, their thirty-odd-year head start, and the droning sound of their voices in the kitchen every morning. He has sufficient trouble coping with himself that it isn’t too much of a leap for him to sympathize with two young people who may have one or two issues with him. Their irritation, he also knows, has its own important role to play: it’s what will guarantee that the children will one day leave home.
If parental kindness were enough, the human race would stagnate and in time die off. The survival of the species hinges on children eventually getting fed up and heading off into the world armed with hopes of finding more satisfying sources of excitement.
In their moments of coziness, when the whole family is piled together on the big bed and the mood is one of tolerance and good humor, Rabih is aware that someday, in the not too distant future, all of this will end according to an edict of nature enacted by a most natural means: the tantrums and fury of adolescence. The continuation of families down the generations depends on the young ones’ eventually losing patience with their elders. It would be a tragedy if the four of them still wanted to lie here with their limbs enlaced in another twenty-five years’ time. Esther and William will ultimately have to begin finding him and Kirsten ridiculous, boring, and old-fashioned in order to develop the impetus to move out of the house.
Their daughter has recently assumed a leadership role in the resistance to parental rule. As she approaches her eleventh birthday, she starts to take exception to her father’s clothes, his accent, and his way of cooking, and rolls her eyes at her mother’s concern with reading good literature and her absurd habit of keeping lemon halves in the fridge rather than more carelessly tossing the unused bits away. The taller and stronger Esther grows, the more she is irritated by her parents’ behavior and habits. William is still too little to cast such a caustic eye at his carers. Nature is gentle with children in this regard, making them sensitive to the full array of their forebears’ flaws only at an age when they are big enough to flee them.
In order to let the separation take its course, Rabih and Kirsten know not to become too strict, distant, or intimidating. They understand how easy it is for children to get hung up on a mum or dad who is hard to read, scary-seeming, or just not around all that much. Such parents can hook in their offspring more tightly than the responsive and stable ones will ever do. Rabih and Kirsten have no wish to be the sort of self-centered, volatile figures with whom a child can become obsessed for life, and so take care to be natural, approachable, and even, sometimes, theatrically daft. They want to be unintimidating enough that Esther and William will be able, when the time comes, to park them cleanly to one side and get on with their lives. Being taken a bit for granted is, they implicitly feel, the best possible indication of the quality of their love.